I hope you didn’t think that spectacles like the Great Snow White Race of 2011 were going to disappear in 2012. There are multiple incarnations of Beauty and the Beast, Frankenstein and many other tales brewing at studios, all of which want to squeeze some money out of recognizable public domain characters.

Dracula is looking like the next target of attacks on multiple fronts. We just heard that Dracula Year Zero is back from the dead, and the film Harker, which recasts the Bram Stoker character as a member of Scotland Yard, is gearing up. Now Sony has picked up a new Dracula spec script from Jason Keller (Machine Gun Preacher, Mirror, Mirror and a rewrite on The Tomb), with the intent to create a ‘period franchise.’ Read More »

It is the opening day at the Toronto International Film Festival and this morning we screened, back to back, two movies directed by Affleck brothers: Ben Affleck‘s The Town and Casey Affleck‘sI’m Still Here. Hit the jump to read my mini review for The Town or watch some video reactions I recorded after the screening with Steve from Collider.Read More »

Warner Bros has released the first trailer for the Ben Affleck-directed big screen adaptation of the Chuck Hogan novel The Prince of Thieves which is titled The Town. Affleck stars as a career thief who falls in love with the manager of a bank he robbed. I know that might not sound like an interesting concept for a movie, but the trailer presents it as a gripping dramatic thriller.

The film co-stars Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, Pete Postlethwaite, and Chris Cooper. I, like many others, was extremely impressed by Affleck’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone, and it looks like he may have stepped up his game with his The Town. And you can’t forget that he also won an academy award for co-writing the screenplay for Good Will Hunting. Affleck worked on the screenplay with Peter Craig and Chuck Hogan.

The trailer will be attached to prints of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, which hits theaters on Friday. But you don’t have to wait until then to see it. Watch it now embedded after the jump, and please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Guillermo del Toro is a busy man. Not only is he facing what must be insane amounts of pressure to make The Hobbit duo of films live up to Peter Jackson’s epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, he’s also stepping up to adapt Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five, starting a series of vampire novels (The Strain, co-written with author Chuck Hogan), and, oh yes—at some point, he wants to help spearhead the convergence of multiple entertainment mediums into an interactive, hybrid storytelling model.

Wired recently spoke to del Toro, and while he was mum on all things Hobbit-related, the Q&A reveals the mind of a man who seems to thrive on pressure and juggling multiple projects at once—all the while remaining conscious of the fact that the entertainment industry is going to look mighty different in 10 years.

Warner Bros has hired Ben Affleck to rewrite, direct and star in a big screen adaptation of the Chuck Hogan novel The Prince of Thieves. The film adaptation will be released under the title The Town. The project was originally set up with Unfaithful director Adrian Lyne. Affleck will do a rewrite on the latest screenplay draft which was co-authored by Peter Craig and Chuck Hogan. Affleck will play a career thief who falls in love with the manager of a bank he robbed.

The film is set in Charlestown, MA, which might further explain Affleck’s interest/involvement. I, like many others, was extremely impressed by Affleck’s directorial debut Gone Baby Gone. And you can’t forget that he also won an academy award for co-writing the screenplay for Good Will Hunting.
The official description of the book follows: The men wear masks. Their guns are drawn on the bank manager. She nervously recites the alarm code, and the tumblers within the huge vault fall. The timing and execution are brilliant. It could be the perfect heist. But as the huge sum of cash is stolen, so too is one man’s heart — and that man is the Prince of Thieves…

Charlestown, a blue-collar Boston neighborhood, produces more bank robbers and armored car thieves than any square mile in the world. In this gripping, intricately plotted thriller, Claire Keesey, the branch manager for a Boston bank and one of an influx of young professionals chipping away at the neighborhood’s insularity, is taken hostage during a robbery. She is released, but Doug MacRay, the brains behind the tough, tight-knit crew of thieves, can’t get her out of his mind. Tracking her down without his mask and gun, Doug introduces himself, and as soon as he and Claire meet, their mutual attraction is undeniable — as are the risks of a relationship.

Meanwhile, Doug’s crew pulls off another audacious, meticulously planned job. Frustrated by their ingenuity and brazen ambition, FBI Agent Adam Frawley begins to zero in on Doug and his pals — and against his own better judgment, he, too, develops more than a professional interest in Claire.

Under pressure from Frawley’s ever-closer investigation, Doug imagines a life for himself away from bank robberies and Charlestown. But before that can happen, the crew learns that there may be a way to rob Boston’s venerable baseball stadium, Fenway Park. It’s a magnificently dangerous and utterly irresistible opportunity — yet for Doug, pursuing his former hostage may be the most dangerous act of all…

Chuck Hogan’s brash tale of four men — thieves, rivals, friends — being hunted through the streets of Boston by a tenacious FBI agent, and the woman who may destroy them all, is a spectacular, stylish, heart-pounding thriller.